Claudine Housen, Staff Reporter
HARTY
WESTERN BUREAU:
BARITA INVESTMENTS' new Montego Bay office will be the focus of the company's operations in western Jamaica, says branch manager Geneieve Harty.
Located at the Shop S301 on the Baywest Shopping Centre on Harbour Street, the branch started operations only in January. The second outside the Corporate Area by Barita, it follows the opening of a Mandeville branch in 2002.
"We are seeing our branch here in Montego Bay as the hub for Western Jamaica," Ms. Harty said. "We see our reach expanding in the entire Western Jamaica servicing not just Montego Bay and its environs but Westmoreland, Hanover and Trelawny."
INDIVIDUAL CLIENTELE
She said that the Montego Bay market is slightly different from that in Kingston.
"The pace is somewhat different from Kingston," she said. "With Montego Bay being a tourist community, the infrastructure is a bit different."
She added that in Kingston the company had a higher percentage of medium to large institutional clients.
"In terms of Montego Bay," she said, "we see more individual clients (and as such) we consider our service here in terms of our outreach to clients very personalised."
The branch is a small one, but she said it was capable of fulfilling all of its customer's investment needs through its links with the main office in New Kingston.
"We are a primary dealer for the Bank of Jamaica so all the various investment instruments the government offers on the market can be purchased through us," she said. Customers can trade in stocks or invest in their unit trust portfolio.
Hailing from the parish of Trelawny, Ms. Harty was an account executive with the Barita group when she got the opportunity to return to her home region.
"Although I was working in Kingston, I was in Montego Bay every weekend," she said. "When the opportunity opened up for a branch manager I gravitated towards it."
